Cologne

[upbeat music]

Excited to have her on the lineup together with Yotto for my show at Bootshaus in Cologne on October 17th.

This is Laura van Dam with Meditation, and this is bringing us to the throwback track of this week

weekWake Your Mind.

The next person in our community that reached out to us when Brian asked the question, where are you on your journey and what are you doing, is the lovely Mark, who is from Germany.

He's from Cologne.

He's just outside Cologne in Germany.

And yeah, he's become, again, I shouldn't be giving you all this backstory about people, but he just went to Porto on holiday, Brian.

There you

[gentle music] Robyn Malloy Goldsby, what are you doing in Germany? [laughs]

What am I doing in Germany? I've been here for 31 years, Jim, and, uh, here at the Excelsior Hotel Ernst in Cologne, where I play the piano here.

I've been at this hotel, it's a five-star Grand European hotel, I've been here for 11 years now.

And one of the highlights of my tenure here is always when the Pittsburgh Symphony comes through Cologne, and they're playing here tonight.

And the maestro himself, Maestro Honick, is staying here at our hotel, and, uh, we're looking forward to welking him in- welcoming him a little later.

He stopped by to see you on an earlier visit, if I remember correctly.

And I've written a collection of short stories called Manhattan Road Trip, which i- they're, they're not autobiographical.

They're fictional short stories about people in the music business and the things that they go through before they actually walk on stage.

We had Warsaw for the first time since the 1980s.

Then we had in very, very quick succession opening night in Cologne, opening night in Amsterdam, the Concertgebouw, one of the greatest halls in the world, opening night in Essen, opening night here last night in the Vienna Konzerthaus, and it really feels like it's all building, um, to this incredible conclusion.

Up next is Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.

This, for me, is one of the most signature Manfred Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra works.

You have publicly challenged anyone in Hungary to shackle you with handcuffs that you cannot pick.

These, my dear sir, are not special make, but I fear you will not get out of them as easily as you slipped out of the German police handcuffs in the jury room at Cologne.

Oh yes, I know all about that.

Your reputation has preceded you in Hungary.

I had succeeded there, but it seemed as if I was facing utter failure here.

I got the wooden plugging out of one of the cuffs when the fear seized me that the false spiritualist might return to murder me.

Popkins, as I had learned from his remark about my escape from handcuffs at Cologne, knew that I had opened the best locks of the German police, and he might conceivably be struck with the possibility that I could escape also from his manacles, plugged though they were.

I climbed out of the oubliette into the dungeon above it, unlocked the massive door of the dungeon, which was easy work as compared to opening some of the locks in American jails, and stepped out into a damp passageway.

Beginning If the Mozartian family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of the box, it was still not without striking features.

There were Mozarts in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century, and as remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne.

To be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times.

It appeared as Mosshard, Mozart, Mozart, and in still other variants.

Besides playing and improvising, they were made to perform all manner of showy stunts.

Wolfgang had to name tones and chords, sounded on keyboards, covered with a cloth, as well as guess the exact pitch of bells, glasses, and clocks.

The travellers went on to Bonn, Cologne, and Aachen, where lived the Princess Amalia, sister of Frederick the Great, whose pressing invitations to Berlin left Leopold cold as soon as he realized she had no money.

He reflected that the kisses without number which she gave the children were would have pleased him better if they had had cash value finally after further progress through the low countries the little man reached paris where the father discovered that most of his letters of recommendation and introduction amounted to little only when they were taken in charge by the bavarian born baron melchior grimm a literary figure of some distinction did results begin to shape themselves a first-rate publicity man grimm launched a campaign for the youngsters in his correspondance littraire with the result that doors promptly opened and invitations began to pour in On New Year's Eve, 1764, the Mozarts were asked to a Grand Couvert at the court in Versailles.

In the northeast of Gaul dwelt in the latter part of the 5th century after Christ a confederacy of German tribes called the Salian Franks, occupying the districts known in later days as Flanders, Artois, and Picardy.

Farther south was the strong and warlike tribe of the Ripuarian Franks, whose territory stretched along the banks of the Rhine from Mainz to Köln and along the Moselle from Koblenz to Metz.

Salians and Ripuarians recognized a loose tie of kinship between them, but there was no strong feeling of unity even in the subdivision of the two nations.

Both Salians and Ripuarians had many petty kings, and there were frequent civil wars between them.

With all his wide, far-reaching schemes he remained, it would seem, at heart a Ripuarian Frank.

Ripuarian, not Salian, and we may conjecture that Neustria was to him as little of a homeland as Aquitaine or even Italy.

The river Rhine, with its great bordering bishoprics, Mainz, Köln, Trier, and its grand Romanesque churches, bore for centuries the character which it had received from the greatest of its sons, the friend alike of Hadrian the Pope and of Alcuin the Scholar, and if not on the actual banks of the Rhine, at least in the near neighborhood of Rhineland, it was fitting that Charles should die.

Doubtless the nature-heated baths, which had been known since the time of Severus Alexander, and which are said to have been named from Apollo Granus, were the chief determining causes which led Charles to visit the place, at which indeed his father Pippin had kept Christmas and Easter as long ago as 765.

In more of epic stateliness he wends, Where youth, in memory only, still attends With foregone passions, raptures long since flown.

So sweeps he down from minster-crowned Cologne, And to the silent level sea descends.

Not such, O Heine, thy mad stream of song, Though now beyond our fitful ocean's hem The eternal tide of beauty harbor thee.

Thou fleddest the broken crags of life along, Beating white flowers of foam out over them, And passionately soughtest thy mother sea.